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Joan Wallack:
Okay, it's time to introduce everybody or to greet everybody. I'm really happy. We have 41 or so people on which is great. And it's wonderful to have the Classes of 1960 and 1961 do something together because a lot of us know each other from when were at Brandeis. It's very exciting. Just a couple of housekeeping remarks before we begin the program. The event is being recorded so our classmates who are unable to attend may view the discussion at a later date because it's being filmed. Please mute yourself when you're not speaking. If you'd like to speak please use the chat feature at the bottom of your screen and write, "I would like to speak." To identify yourself.
Joan Wallack:
And when it's your turn to speak, Sharon Rosenberg, from the office of alumni relations will call on you to unmute and we'll get to as many questions as possible. Welcome all of you. We're really excited to be here. And the first thing I'm going to do, because a very special person is going to be introducing another very special person, Steve Whitfield. But Adrienne Rosenblatt, whom I know for many years because she and I were both president of our women's committee in Connecticut. I was in New Haven and she was in Hartford. And we did a lot of things together. And she's passionate about Brandeis and has held many volunteer positions in the past five decades. She served on the alumni admissions counsel as chair of Connecticut for 30 years. She coordinated off campus interviews, as well as alumni volunteer coverage of college fairs. And she herself conducted many interviews. She also represented Brandeis very well at college fairs.
Joan Wallack:
The Brandeis National Women's Committee, she had various leadership positions and she gave back to the group. The group was a Brandeis National Women's Committee. That's what it was called, now it's the National Committee. She was the class correspondent for the class of 1961 for many years and a reunion committee member for many of her class of 61 reunions. And she's the president's counselor. Interestingly, Adrienne's late husband, Joel, was also a member of the class of 1961. And her daughter Julie, is a member of the class of 1988. And she's a double Brandeis granny parent to Matthew, class of 2020 and Emily, class of 2023. That's a wonderful bunch of information about Adrienne. And Adrienne has an introduction which you will see next. I think it's on film, about Stephen. And then Steve will take it over.
Adrienne Rosenblatt:
Hi everyone. Thank you Joan and Milt for your kind words. I have fun memories of our long history of working together as part of the Connecticut Contingent from the early days of the University. I'm delighted to welcome you all to the first event of the 60th reunion shared by the classes of 60 and 61. Hopefully, this will be the first and the last virtual reunion. If I were to share a detailed bio of tonight's speaker, Steve Whitfield, a great friend of the University and his many accomplishments, awards and accolades, that would be an event in and of itself.
Adrienne Rosenblatt:
So, I will just share with you a few highlights and personal anecdotes. Steve Whitfield is professor Emeritus of American studies at Brandeis. He is also a Brandeis alumnus having received his PhD at the University in 1972. He taught at Brandeis for more than 40 years before his retirement and is a recipient of the Louis D. Brandeis prize for excellence in teaching. He also served as a visiting professor in Jerusalem, Paris, and Munich. Although none of us have had the opportunity to take a course with him, Steve has become one of the most beloved and highly regarded members of the faculty. As a personal aside, after just one course with Steve, my daughter Julie, class of 88, a psyche major, quickly became a double major in psychology and American studies.
Adrienne Rosenblatt:
I myself worked with Steve for many years as he wrote Syllabi for the Brandeis National Committee and traveled across the country participating in our University on wheels program. I hope many of you were able to attend Steve's virtual event this past fall for his recently published book, Learning On The Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University. He has authored eight other books, including In Search of American Jewish Culture. And has edited, A Companion To 20th Century in America. If you have not yet purchased your copy of Learning On The Left, I highly recommend that you do. In the chat box you will find a link to purchase the book through Brandeis University Press and a 20% discount code. The focus of our event tonight will be our time at Brandeis as discussed in Learning On The Left. After Steve speaks about why that period was so significant, he welcomes our interactive feedback with our perspectives on his analysis.
Adrienne Rosenblatt:
I would now like to share with you a poem that I first wrote for Steve, some 45 years ago as he lectured to members of the Connecticut Alumni Association at my home in Connecticut. Those who know me know that I rarely let an occasion go by without a few lines of verse. "We welcome you Steve, as a guest and a friend. You've traveled the country for us without end. You've given your time and your thoughts to our cause. We're here to salute you and give you applause. Your status on campus is highly respected. Your charm and intelligence duly reflected. Your classes are excellent, that we can trust. A course with Steve Whitfield's a definite must.
Adrienne Rosenblatt:
We're all pleased as punch that you're with us today. We're eager to hear what you're eager to say. Your book and its premise are truly revealing. The leftist's among us will find it appealing. Please help us historically from your perspective, this virtual audience is quite receptive. Your talent for teaching has made it an art, now on with reunion we're ready to start." It is now my honor and privilege to introduce to you the only person I ever met who writes a thank you note back to you after he receives a thank you note you sent to him. Professor Steve Whitfield.
Stephen Whitfield:
Adrienne, thank you so much for that extraordinarily touching and also amusing introduction. I was not dry eyed during much of it. I much appreciate the poem and the sentiments, of course cherishing the friendship with you and with Julie. And I'm really deeply, deeply grateful for that. Even if you pointed out at least one of my eccentricities. I thank everybody for making this occasion possible. I know it seems rather odd as has already been noted that we're having a reunion here, a pre reunion weekend that will not be in fact on the weekend in early June. And as soon as you've attended a University in which, because of the Jewish holidays something like Friday is really a Brandeis Tuesday and something like Wednesday is really a Brandeis Monday. The violation of the Gregorian calendar that Brandeis has done will therefore not strike you as very odd that will already having a reunion weekend.
Stephen Whitfield:
Anyway, I thank you very much. And of course to Joan and Milt as well for making this event possible. And for an opportunity really to talk about, as Adrienne mentioned, to talk about the political history of Brandeis with a special focus on the years in which you were there. And to try to suggest the ways in which it was really something singular, something truly unusual, something worthy of flection over really well over half a century later. Every University of course, wants to see itself as distinctive. Every college and University wants to have some sort of niche in order to attract students and attract faculty by claiming that by attending that particular institution of higher learning, they will be someplace that is unlike any place else. Brandeis is not exempt from those particular claims.
Stephen Whitfield:
Everybody of course knows that it was the first Jewish sponsored non-sectarian University really. Not only in the Western hemisphere, but I believe in the world and still is. That of course is one very remarkable feature. But what Learning On The Left is an effort to claim is that its politics have also been different. So that when President Sachar would meet with alumni, I'm told that he would ask them which issues, which protests animated them when they were undergraduates. And when President Sachar was told, which particular causes were so important to the undergraduates, he would be able to guess what year it was that they had graduated. So this is something which again is striking. I don't think, for example, that the President of Brigham Young University or Southern Methodist University or Ohio Wesleyan or UCLA, they don't probably ask their alumni what were the causes that animated them?
Stephen Whitfield:
So this is something that I believe is really peculiar to Brandeis and even more peculiar, I believe in the years that you were there. Forgive my presumptuousness in trying to tell you, at least briefly what I thought life there was like, but also to put it within a larger perspective of what the book to which Adrienne refers. What that book is really an attempt to do. And that is to look at the entire course of the history of the University that has from 1948 until close to the very present. I retired in 2016 and the book basically stops there, but the book also is asymmetrical. It's top heavy in focusing on the years that you were there. That is basically from 1948 until roughly the mid 1970s. That is roughly the first quarter of a century of the history of the University in which Brandeis was distinctive.
Stephen Whitfield:
And I believe also in some ways, a prelude to what would happen not only in American higher education after you were there, but also broadly speaking the changes that were to take place in various ways in American political life. So my focus through research was upon the activists, the writers, the thinkers. Who either served on the Brandeis faculty or graduated from the University and who played an unusual role, I would say a disproportionate role, in American public life in changing in all sorts of ways the contours of American politics in ways that were well in a way ahead of the tiny numbers that we associate with the University itself. So in doing so, the effort was really to suggest that something about the atmospherics, something about the goal, something about the ideals of the University seem to attract people who therefore drove campus life to the left and in various ways the alumni and the faculty were part of a broader commitment to make liberalism operational, to make progressivism and in some cases, radicalism more conspicuous in American public life.
Stephen Whitfield:
So therefore it focuses on a number of people with whom you might've studied Max Lerner, for example, a kind of iconic figure in the history of mid-century American liberalism. Lawrence Fuchs. And those are the two figures in chapter five that were perhaps in an important way assigned for today people whom you would have known. But also other figures, Eleanor Roosevelt figure in clearly another extraordinarily important figure, not only in the history of American liberalism, but I tried to suggest also in the history of Brandeis University itself. And I know at least one of you had studied with Eleanor Roosevelt during the three years that she taught on the Brandeis campus with a very, very modest rank and with extraordinary modesty as a dedication to the act of teaching. So these were among the key figures that Brandeis University attracted to its faculty.
Stephen Whitfield:
The students tended to come from homes that were broadly speaking liberal and progressive. Many of them had come from homes that might have been associated with the American working class that had been lifted up most strikingly through the new deal of Franklin D Roosevelt. Ways by which, in other words they were one generation perhaps away from knowing of the poverty and the modest circumstances of Jewish... particularly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And that these were homes that deeply appreciated the ways by which the new deal had checked the abuses of American capitalism in the 1930s. And we're very, very grateful for what the liberal wing of the democratic party had done for really for millions of such families.
Stephen Whitfield:
There were also red diaper babies as well. That is people whose own parents had been communists. And Brandeis was seen as a refuge in all sorts of ways for people who were clearly going to be stigmatized and in some ways persecuted for their parents in the course of the early years of the cold war in the late 1940s, and at least through the 1950s. So these were some of the people who made Brandeis, I believe, distinctive and in doing so they were to make more conspicuous perhaps, make more vibrant the tradition of American liberalism itself. And it is one of the key arguments of the book, perhaps the key argument that Brandeis can be seen as a index of the fate of American liberalism itself. So that say in the era in which the classes of 1960 and 1961 were on the campus this was an era in which liberalism was in some ways very beleaguered.
Stephen Whitfield:
It was the year, Of course I need not tell you, of McCarthyism. The era in which certainly in the early to mid 1950s, if not necessarily a little bit later there was an extraordinary sensitivity feeling to the dangers of communism, both at home and abroad. And this was an important check on liberal impulses itself, liberal impulses themselves. But nevertheless this was something in which Brandeis served as a salvation for all sorts of people with those convictions liberalism itself is of course subject to all sorts of elusive definitions. Liberalism is historically contingent. It doesn't have often any sort of stable definition but broadly speaking, at least for purposes of the book, I emphasize the ways in which it showed a commitment to civil rights, a commitment to civil liberties, certainly sympathy for the American labor movement and labor unions in that era.
Stephen Whitfield:
You could also say that liberalism also entailed a certain cosmopolitanism that is a repudiation of parochialism. Things like support for the United Nations and Eleanor Roosevelt of course, personified that commitment to the United Nations and the international declaration of human rights. And then after you had graduated, but within roughly a decade of your graduation's classes of 60 and 61, liberalism itself underwent a change. And that change occurred in 1968 and at the very beginning of 1969. Before that one could say that liberalism entailed a belief that prejudice was artificial and irrational, that the barriers to aspiration and achievement because of prejudice based on race or based on religion, or based on gender. That all these particular sorts of prejudices if they could be overcome, if the institutional impediments to individual achievement could be eliminated by law or by education. Then everybody would more or less turn out the same because we belong to the same human family, because we have the same needs, the same desires, the same hopes, the same dreams. So that was the liberal faith that had animated the founding of Brandeis University itself.
Stephen Whitfield:
I believe and I can well stand corrected on this in a few minutes. I believe that that is also what animated both the majority of students who were political and the faculty who were political in the roughly first quarter of a century of the history of the University itself. And that is a belief in the possibility of individual promise, individual hope, individual achievement. Once the barriers in the form of prejudice and discrimination had been eliminated. I need not emphasize to everybody in the gallery that of course it was the record of anti-Semitism that had inspired the creation of the University itself. And I can say that in my own research when I looked at the histories of faculty members who were of Jewish background. I don't think I found a single career line of Jews who joined the Brandeis faculty who did not have somewhere in their past, some brush with anti-Semitism itself. Some less than enthusiastic recommendation for graduate school, some less than enthusiastic recommendation for a job because of their Jewish identity.
Stephen Whitfield:
And therefore Brandeis University itself was an extraordinary opportunity for them to go as far as their own individual talent and individual hopes would be able to a would be able to accomplish. So that was the liberal faith of the 1940s, the 1950s. And I believe well into the 1960s. That people should be judged on the basis of who they were, and that somehow if who they were was limited or impoverished by prejudice, that somehow it was the requirement, the obligation of liberalism, to bring those limitations to an end. And then after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968, there was a tremendous impetus on the part of African American students on the Brandeis campus to accelerate the process that had begun earlier to grant more weight and more attention to the needs. And let's say the demands of black students on the Brandeis campus and in the immediate aftermath of Dr.King's assassination, black students issued a series of demands.
Stephen Whitfield:
One of which was that a special set of scholarships, 10 of them, should be designated to students or to applicants, not on the basis of individual promise or individual achievement, but also on the basis of their race. And the demand was that those 10 scholarships should go to African-American students. And when President Sachar for perhaps understandable reasons to keep the Brandeis campus as Pacific, as calm as possible, and perhaps out of his own understanding of the particular demands and needs of African-American students at the end of the 1960s. President Sachar agreed with those demands. And I would say that was a pivotal moment in the change that was to occur more directly in the following decades into what is meant by liberalism. And then in January of 1969, that is barely a decade. Not even a decade after you had graduated when black students took over Ford hall, no longer in existence.
Stephen Whitfield:
And with a whole series of demands, including the creation of an African-American studies department now known as African and Afro-American studies, to be in which the faculty members and the chair of that department were to be determined by black students having a significant input and a series of other demands. That posed the most direct and the most explicit challenge to the earlier meaning of liberalism itself. Many of those demands were not accepted and then after less than two weeks the students left Ford hall. It was peaceful. No police were invited to intervene to bring the takeover to an end. But one would say that from that moment on beginning in January of 1969, a new definition of liberalism itself was to occur. And that is a liberalism that looked not only at personal attributes, but also on how one is connected to a whole series of social categories.
Stephen Whitfield:
All of which are now of course very familiar in terms of race or religion or gender, sexual orientation and so on. So that in that sense, liberalism came to be something very different from what the founders had intended. It poses a very direct challenge to a whole series of issues that Brandeis and virtually every other institution of learning now faces, which is to say how to reconcile the sometimes competing demands and values by which one wants to look at a personal record. One wants to evaluate one's own individual attributes while at the same time wanting to recreate a campus atmosphere, a learning atmosphere, in which diversity and pluralism and difference are recognized and legitimated. As central to a series of educational goals. After 1969, that created an ideological demand that did not exist when you were undergraduates.
Stephen Whitfield:
That posed a very different set of challenges, which institutions like Brandeis are still wrestling with. And that is why the book itself focuses more heavily upon the earlier years when liberalism was not only more easily defined, but also when the liberalism and even the radicalism of Brandeis students and faculty were also something that was genuinely distinctive. And the claim, particularly in the chapter three of Learning On The Left, was seeking to make the case that Brandeis was not only peculiar in the 1950s, but also was to set the stage for the extraordinary convulsions that were to take place in the 1960s and at least somewhat into the 1970s. So that Brandeis in the 1950s as a number of alumni from Michael Walzer to Martin Peretz, have basically claimed that at Brandeis the 1960s arrived in the 1950s. And that is to say it made Brandeis really, really different.
Stephen Whitfield:
One would have to go to, let's say at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of California at Berkeley maybe the city college of New York ultimately City University of New York, to find something comparable to the political activism, the political consciousness that existed at Brandeis in the first roughly... well, certainly in the 1940s and 1950s. And then increasingly other colleges and Universities adopted the political commitment, the political dedication, that Brandeis had already shown earlier and Brandeis in that sense was unusual because the other Universities that I mentioned were clearly public Universities, either state or public Universities.
Stephen Whitfield:
And that again, may Brandeis very, very different. So that's at least broadly the theme that I was trying to suggest as something which the book seeks to both define and to record and of course there's inevitably the caveat that the angle from which I try to approach the history of the University was itself perhaps an eccentric angle that is I'm willing to acknowledge that perhaps most Brandeis students and very many of the Brandeis faculty, even in the years of heightened political consciousness may not themselves have been political, may have had other interests. The book itself in that sense is very lopsided. The sciences, the physical sciences, the natural sciences are almost entirely left out.
Stephen Whitfield:
The arts are probably largely left out with important exceptions like Leonard Bernstein, an extraordinarily, politically conscious musical figure. But for the most part, it's people from the social sciences who play a larger role in this book than let's say a different kind of history would provide. It's not intended in any way to be an official history. The book comes with no administrative approval or in premature. The book itself in that sense is not in any way seeking to offer a history of the University, which by the way, still very much needs to be written. But it's something that it seems to me tries to get at what made Brandeis, such at least from the perspective of a researcher and historian, made it such an extraordinarily lively and unusual place with all sorts of colorful figures attending it and graduating from it and teaching there. A place that was disputatious, that in which many, many things were contested, even as elsewhere in American academic life a certain sense of passivity and Apolitical sentiments were to prevail.
Stephen Whitfield:
That's what made Brandeis from the viewpoint of an historian, it seems to me, so interesting. But I am the first to concede that there are many, many things that I did not include in the book and undoubtedly many other things that I got wrong and now is the opportunity. And I'm looking at Sharon Rosenberg now, is the opportunity to see what you might want to talk about in terms of what might also be said, your own impressions, your own reminiscences your own disagreements with regard to what I've tried to suggest to you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you, Steve. So just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question or share a memory or a reflection or a comment. Just type in the chat, I have a question and I'll start calling on people from that. And so the first question, Ellie Kessler Cohen.
Sue Packel:
Mute.
Ellie Kessler Cohen:
My daughter-in-law's father, Isaac Kramnik came to teach at Brandeis. And Isaac said to me, "You know why that faculty was so terrific?" He said, "Sachar got every commi who couldn't get a job any place else and that brought a lot of the Holocaust and left his people to teach." I just thought that was a wonderful background to what happened. Steve, I was really shocked recently when I read an article in our local Jewish news, talking about Brandeis and being closed down for the Passover holiday, because kids couldn't get home for Passover Easter. So they stayed in and the University was holding it there.
Ellie Kessler Cohen:
And they said that there were one third of the population was Jewish. That shocked me. And it goes back to what you're saying in the beginning because I keep remember saying that this would be a home... Sachar saying this would be a home for Jewish students in the community. And given the situation today with the state of anti-Semitism, I wondered where there's going to be a home for our kids as this continues. But anecdotally, it was a fabulous place to be a student. It was so yeasty and so exciting. And I think probably I speak for all of us. It really framed the way we look and see the world. Made us activists.
Stephen Whitfield:
Great. Thank you, Ellie. First of all, did I get this right that Isaac Kramnik is your daughter-in-law's father?
Ellie Kessler Cohen:
Yes, he's my Machatunim.
Stephen Whitfield:
Okay, great. He's mentioned in the book because he a co-authored, a terrific biography of Harold Laski-
Ellie Kessler Cohen:
Yes. Yes.
Stephen Whitfield:
Who was under consideration to be the first president of the University before the job went to Dr. Sacher. And Laski was considered to be the most important socialist intellectual in the English speaking world. It would have proved exactly had he been selected and he would not have been a good choice, but that's a separate matter. It would have demonstrated through him, his own person, exactly how leftist the University would have been at the very, very beginning. He was to die actually in 1950. So the opportunity really to have served was an elusive one. But you raise the question of the composition of the student body at the moment, which is another way of saying that this is the challenge that the University faces. Which is to say, we seek to get the most qualified, the most promising students that we can.
Stephen Whitfield:
We want to sustain the academic excellence of the University, which it has exhibited from the very beginning. We don't want to in any way compromise those particular academic standards. And at the same time, we also want to make sure that we have the diversity, which will guaranteed that the students who come to the University will indeed be able to meet people of different backgrounds. So that is a standard of the... let's say the second phase of liberalism that I tried to describe. That it was far less characteristic of the first phase, which was based entirely on if you're the most qualified academically, if you've done well at top high schools and so on, we will have a place for you. There was always the assumption, and I just want to underscore before this point, there was always the assumption I believe, that if you make sure that it would be that competition would be based on talent and merit, the Jewish kids would in fact do very, very well.
Stephen Whitfield:
So the idea was, and especially since the since the SATs were established at the end of the 1940s. The view was that if you could only have so-called objective measurements, not that somebody has a wonderful personality, not that somebody is sociable, not that somebody gets along with others, then Jewish students would in fact be able to compete very well without the quota system that existed earlier which looked at certain other kinds of characteristics that allegedly put Jews at a disadvantage. So what you're describing is a situation in which one can disagree about how the ways in which those competing ideals play out. I do not know, I've been retired for close to five years now... four and a half years.
Stephen Whitfield:
I claim no knowledge of exactly how admissions works, no knowledge exactly of what proportions of students at Brandeis now are Jewish or not Jewish. I believe that approximately one in five, maybe as much as one in four is of east Asian background. That is whether a foreign student or possibly a first or second generation that is an Asian American. So that's an extraordinarily high figure because Brandeis of course has wanted to get to attract the very best academically most gifted students and that's the way it has come out. But the other thing I would want to say and I apologize for the length of this response is that a historical joke was played upon Brandeis because in the decades that followed it's inauguration, the quotas that existed at Ivy league institutions largely evaporated.
Stephen Whitfield:
I would say they had almost completely evaporated with minor exceptions of a couple of Ivy league schools in the 1960s. So the Jewish students could compete very effectively and go to Ivy league and other elite institutions without having to believe that Brandeis had least served as a refuge for them. So my understanding is that no qualified Jewish student in the United States is going to be in the year 2021, kept out of an appropriate institution of higher learning on the basis of ethnicity or religion. And that was not the case in 1948.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Sharon Rivo, did you mention to me that you had a question?
Sharon Rivo:
No, I didn't but I do have one actually.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Okay. Go for it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Sharon Rivo can't be muted. Can she Sharon?
Sharon Rivo:
Well, I can try, but just to comment. When I'm always discussing the experience that I had at Brandeis and I don't know if this was true for other students, but I was a Poli sci major. I was also a transfer student. I'd spent two years at the University of Illinois in a sorority before I came to Brandeis. And I was a Poli Sci major and what I found so extraordinary later, I wasn't aware of it at the time, is that the women's students in the department were treated absolutely equally with the male students. And I clearly remember a seminar where sitting down and John Roche basically saying, "Okay, who wants to go to law school? Who wants to go to graduate school? We're going to have X number of graduates. We'd like to if possible get behind the students and be able to write good recommendation. So we don't want five kids all applying to the same place if we can avoid it."
Sharon Rivo:
And I remember later saying to both my family and to other people that we were treated... the women in the department exactly like the guys. And this was not true of the other women that I knew that went to other Universities. And especially those that went to women's colleges. They were told, "No, you can't do this. You can't do that. You can't do the other kind of thing." And I don't know if that's a common experience or not. This is not something that you particularly addressed in any way about the way in which the students themselves were treated on the campus. But I think that was an extraordinary thing at least for our class or at least the time that we were there. And maybe it was part of who these teachers were and their background and their feeling of both social justice and liberalism that was somewhat different, very different in fact, from most of these other... shall we say the Vassar's and the Radcliffe's in the other Universities at the time. So it's part a question but part comment.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. It's very gratifying Sharon to hear that. There's a little bit of evidence, it's sort of impressionistic evidence, it's mentioned in the book of a number of women who felt exactly the same way you did. I don't think it was any bias on my part that I did not find much evidence that goes against what you're saying that is either because the Ivy league schools with which Brandeis felt that it was competing, often of course had separate education or in certain places no women's education at all. And therefore maybe there was a sense of gratitude that Brandeis was highly competitive academically and egalitarian along the ways that you're suggesting.
Stephen Whitfield:
Of course it was co-educational from the very beginning, but the only sour note here of course is that you would have been taught by virtually no female faculty. And again this is one of the great historical mysteries, from what I can tell there were very few people at the time, let's say in the 1950s, who saw any sort of problem with that or felt that this was an injustice that somehow needed to be rectified. That was, I think something that the 1960s of course with the beginning or the resurgence of American feminism was of course, to alter, but in the somewhat earlier decade, decade and a half, I'm struck in the basis of my own research. And I went through back issues of the justice, the extent to which nobody seemed to have noticed that this was predictably a problem. But it was a problem that of course, very slowly was to be rectified, still not adequately. I'm very glad to hear your comment about your sense that everybody was treated equally.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Steve. So Paula Resnick and then after Paula, Linda Kamm.
Paula Resnick:
Hi, Steve. I'm so glad. I've had computer problems. I'm so glad I've got one working again. Actually, first I'd like to respond what Sharon just said and tie them with what you were talking about. I came from Illinois. I came from Chicago. Most of my friends went to the University of Illinois or similar schools and nobody ever considered graduate school or law school, professional school or anything. It just didn't exist to us and it wasn't until I got to Brandeis there, I said, "Oh my God." And had trouble convincing my parents to let me stay at a liberal arts school because I wouldn't be able to teach when I got out. So I took night courses at Lesley college and went to summer school so I could teach which actually turned out fine because I married a husband in graduate school and went right to work.
Paula Resnick:
But I have a question. I don't know if this is appropriate to ask and I don't know if you want to answer this but I read most of your book and I know you discussed the faculty members were involved in dissent and in commentary and in the partisan review and all the political machinations that went on was there. But I've been frustrated for years because I remember there was a bit of a scandal over the whole thing with a couple of faculty members and wives and relationships and it had to do with... I don't remember it was... I can't remember but I also think Harold Weisberg who taught philosophy and I'm hoping somebody can tell me who that was because it's been driving me crazy.
Stephen Whitfield:
I can answer that question but let's do this privately. But there is an answer to that. I'm sorry. I don't feel right about mentioning that there was a marital scandal. Let's put it that way.
Paula Resnick:
Okay. At least I'm remembering that part correctly. I didn't think it was appropriate, but it was my one chance to ask. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. Okay. Thanks Paula. Sorry to dodge that.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, Linda.
Linda Kramm:
Yeah. Thank you, Steve. It's very-
Stephen Whitfield:
Hi Linda.
Linda Kramm:
... interesting. Terrific book but I have one question that relates to the notion that when Brandeis was founded, there were Jewish quotas at most of the Universities. And I've always thought that the reason that our class was so exceptional was in part that the Ivy league was not really accessible to so many of us. Did you find that when the the quotas at other Universities were eliminated or lessened that the quality of the applicant pool to Brandeis diminished in any way?
Stephen Whitfield:
Great question. First of all, I think what we're talking about when we're talking about quotas is almost always going to be Ivy league institutions. Some were more severe than others. The most severe I can say, I won't answer Paula's question in public, but I can say that Princeton and Dartmouth were probably the worst offenders. Harvard was probably the most open and historically had been from early in the 20th century even though Harvard famously imposed quotas beginning of the 1920s, which allowed other Ivy league colleges, including Columbia and Yale perhaps most conspicuously to follow suit. I don't really know the answer to the question about the elimination of quotas that were really well underway in the 1950s and into the 1960s in terms of how it affected the applicant pool. I have heard stories. I can't confirm them and this is not intended to to suck up to the classes of 60 and 61.
Stephen Whitfield:
But I have heard that the best years in terms of the standard measurements of qualifications for students were at the very end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. Again, I can't confirm that and these are records that are really inaccessible and perhaps appropriately so but logically Linda, I think if I understand the thrust or your question. Logically it should be the case that as qualified Jewish students could get in anywhere subject to all the usual limitations of competitiveness is almost inevitably the case, logically the case, that Brandeis would not be as able to compete. And perhaps even in the light of what Sharon Rivo was mentioning earlier.
Stephen Whitfield:
The fact that women could increasingly attend Ivy league institutions. I think Yale starts in the early 1970s. So Brandeis had a tremendous headstart and getting the most academically able women to come to the University. It's bound to have an effect in ensuring that it would not be quite as distinguished academically by let's say, the end of the sixties. And the quota system had been eliminated everywhere as it would have been earlier. I don't know this for a fact my guess would be that it probably would have been the case. Logically it should be.
Linda Kramm:
I just want to confirm that we were special.
Stephen Whitfield:
Right, right. That's right. And you are.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Mickey Joseph's.
Miriam Lieberman Josephs:
Miriam Lieberman Joseph's. And I also want to build on something that Linda said. I was a sociology major and Maurice Stein had said that Brandeis at the time was militantly secular. And I'm wondering how the opening up of the Ivy league impacted Brandeis's view of itself and the way it had to deal with its Jewishness. And emphasis on its Jewishness.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. Great question. And I have to tell you that about a month ago, I was on a Zoom call with Maurice Stein. So he's still around well into his 90s and he's still Zooming. It's a great question. I can't do justice to it. The secular part of it certainly I think was more characteristic again of the early years than it came to be later. And this is again, one of the phenomenon that Brandeis has adapted to. And that is that well, after you had all graduated maybe close to a generation after you had graduated, Brandeis's Jewishness took a less secular and more pious and observant turn. There were efforts increasingly, I know, by the admissions office to go to a Jewish day schools to attract students and many of them were among the able to students that Brandeis was able to attract.
Stephen Whitfield:
So the most striking thing, I believe, that would be characteristic of Brandeis by the end of the 20th century that would not have been the case mid century was really men who were wearing kippot. Considerably more activity in the direction of observance. Always within the framework, of course, that one could participate or not participate in all sorts of ways. So that I think is the single biggest change among Jews. But the other factor which had been mentioned earlier was of course the proportion of Jewish students has undergone tremendous change. Again, we don't know this for sure. Beginning in the end of the 1940s, it was a Massachusetts law to ask applicants for admission in colleges, even private colleges in Massachusetts, to ask about ethnicity or race or religion.
Stephen Whitfield:
So we don't really have exact figures in any way but the usual estimate was well into the 1960s about two thirds of the student body was Jewish. It may well be now roughly one-third. And that may be either by some combination of Jewish students having the opportunities to go everywhere as previously discussed. Plus the extraordinary impact that students from China in particular have had upon American higher education. They have the skills, they have the ambition, they have the aspiration. In many cases, they also have the financial resources to really change the entire composition of student bodies at institutions like Brandeis and Ivy league institutions. So that has been a tremendous change but I think the Jewish sponsorship remains of course not only distinctive but something which I know the current president, Ron Liebowitz, as well as most of his predecessors were very much committed to preserving.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Any other questions? If you have a question feel free to note it in the chat that you have a question or use the raise hand feature. Okay. Moss.
Moss Blachman:
Thanks so much. I really appreciate the presentation, the book and the rest of it. I wonder if I raised a slightly different question that you've sort of triggered in my mind while you were talking, especially in the beginning. I was thinking back to my own experience and thinking about having taken courses with Mark Kooza, John Roche, Larry Fuchs, Milky Saxe and coming to Brandeis as a Jewish kid from the south where to say the least the left leaning liberal education was hardly what I experienced in my educational background except in the home. And one of the things that I remember was the degree to which especially John Roche always started from and in the middle connected to and in the end ended with some set of values. I remember his presentations and lectures and discussions. So it was not only that he treated women the same but I remember his conversations about his own experience in the military and the work that he did at the time to create integration and fight against segregation.
Moss Blachman:
These were things that were palpable in the classroom. Larry Fuchs on the other hand from my memory was very, very careful about how he taught. And so I wondered as you are going back through this and thinking about it and thinking about the fact of the... we benefited from having so many faculty that other schools wouldn't touch because they were radioactive. Have you thought much about how that affected their teaching and what it was that they wanted to get out of the experience of being at Brandeis and the degree to which they were really committed to what Brandeis was about? Because I got those messages from people. It certainly changed my life and I'm very appreciative of your book by the way.
Stephen Whitfield:
Oh, thank you. And I speak to you as a fellow Southern Jew. Texas, Florida, Louisiana. It's a great question because it's something that I think every teacher has to wrestle with and that is ensuring that if you're ethical, if you're responsible, that you don't step over the line from simply seeking to convey values to going into the area of indoctrination especially because many students, not particularly at Brandeis but elsewhere, are in fact often so receptive to adults who seem to have very strong convictions some of whom may be even charismatic. And it's always a danger, of course, that one's own values can infect minds that need to always be skeptical.
Stephen Whitfield:
It's interesting that that you mentioned Roche and Fuchs in that connection. I wouldn't have thought that Fuchs in that sense where it was different from Roche but I'm interested in your recollection along those lines. Their own values in the 1950s and 1960s until the Vietnam war were remarkably similar, remarkably congenial, they were friends at the time. And yet you're saying that they really have somewhat different approaches. You might say that Roche by the power of his intellect, by his wit and his cleverness was sure to have a tremendous, tremendous impact and to elicit admiration. Whereas Fuchs probably trusted that the way he arranged the material... I'm just guessing now here. The way he sought to guide discussion and debate, probably was willing to hope that the same values would come out but perhaps more indirectly and more subtly. Does that sound like a plausible way of explaining the difference?
Moss Blachman:
It's pretty tough to work with a 60 something year old memory, but I would say John Roche was very careful. At least I thought he was not, to impose his view but to be very clear about it and to be open and to allow the intellectual conversation and the challenge to go on. And I remember that as a young student. What I remember about Larry Fuchs was that I was clear where he stood at sort of, if you will, on his values. But for example, I learned survey analysis from Larry Fuchs, which is hard to believe that because later on when I went to graduate school and did my PhD and teaching and all the rest and I'm with all these people who are talking about survey analysis, and I'm going, "Oh my God, we did an actual survey in the class." We actually did that.
Moss Blachman:
And I thought of him more as a person who was so concerned about the ethics of analysis and how we went about doing things and what we did. And he wanted us to understand where things were. So talking about political opinions was a way he got at it, in the way in which perhaps you're talking about it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Moss Blachman:
But it was always much more the sort of role of the somewhat distant scholar, at least that's my memory of him. And obviously learned a lot from him.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. And of course in that era, Fuchs was more oriented toward what political science was at the time. Was always very proud that the department was not called political science, but it was called politics. But may I ask you a follow up question? What about Mark Kooza in that respect?
Moss Blachman:
What I got from him was in the very beginning, I would listen to his presentations and lectures and it took me a while as a kid because my background. I didn't have anybody who talked the way he did when I went to high school. And so it took a while for me to learn how to listen to him. And what I got out of him was the value of solid intellectual thinking and how one related that to a set of values. I also learned from him how to think the structures. The cultural structure.
Moss Blachman:
What later I understood much better when I studied the Frankfurt school, but in terms of his work, he presented it that way. And he was sort of the master of it. And people sat at his feet and listened to him. And so it forced me to think about these broad historical sweeps and trends and ways in which structures affected people's lives. And especially as I said, that the ways in which you could intellectually create structures. And I thought he was magnificent at that, but I didn't sense... I know other people had it. I never sensed the kind of warmth from him that I did from John Roche, who was just this sort of charismatic hugger.
Stephen Whitfield:
Sure, sure. And I need not add that. Mark Kooza is the only Brandeis faculty member ever to be explicitly denounced by the Vatican. By Pope Paul the sixth. No other Brandeis faculty members so far has been denounced by name by the Vatican.
Moss Blachman:
Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Glee, I saw that you noted something in the chat. Oh, Glee, you're still muted.
Merle Glee Snyder:
Mute. Okay. I studied in department of near Eastern Judaic studies with Cyrus Gordon and Nahum Glasser. And I was studying with graduate students, Cyrus Gordon had many Episcopal ministers who was studying with him to get a broad view, et cetera. I had a very solid background and I asked Cyrus Gordon for recommendation for graduate school. And I learned subsequently from a camp counselor of mine from campy avenue Jewish camp that he added a letter of recommendation on my behalf because Cyrus Gordon had written, "I wouldn't recommend that you accept her because she'll probably get married and won't finish the program." And at the time... Yes, my eyes popped open like that. And at the time I was not startled.
Merle Glee Snyder:
I went about my life, but I was astonished because I was one of Cyrus Gordon's best students, but I was a woman. And that was his gut reaction. I studied with rabbi Arthur Green, who later became the president of the reconstructionist seminary in Philadelphia. And as I say, with lots of these graduate students and Cyrus Gordon just directly said, "She's a girl and she's going to get married. Don't bother with her." And I was appalled, but that was the norm. I had another interesting experience maybe 10 years ago or something. I was in a program called Sages & Seekers with AP high school students and seniors. And I got this information from some place. And we met weekly for seven consecutive weeks with one student. And he finally said to me, "Glee, you've got so many interests. How come you went into education?"
Merle Glee Snyder:
At this point I was a day school principal. And I had been head of school for 17 years, whatever. And he says, "How come you went into education?" And I said to him, "Because women of my generation became either nurses, teachers, or... what was the other, or secretaries? And I didn't want to be a nurse or a secretary. So I chose to be a teacher because I had some model women who were the teachers." But this young 17 year old AP student in the town of Wayland, I think, asked me, he says, "Why did you go into education?" And that's the way the world has been changing. And I started with Mark Kuza and I will admit to you I didn't understand a word he was saying. Didn't understand him at all. But I think that was my only C plus at Brandeis was from Mark Kuza, but okay. I've survived since then. So that's my story.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. It's disgraceful what you described with that recommendation course. I don't have any other comment.
Merle Glee Snyder:
But what's disgraceful is that I wasn't surprised. I was not shocked and militant when I heard this, but there was somebody else in my life who had known me in a different way. And I think he was at UCLA. He says, "I submitted a letter of recommendation on your behalf to counteract this." And that's what's distressing to me is that I wasn't so distressed. So be it.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Rosalie.
Rosalie Alexander:
Yes. I just have a follow-up comment. Although the impact of what I'm about to say wasn't anywhere close to the impact of what we just heard. I do have a distinct memory of having a teaching assistant in my senior year when we were all taking president Sacher's history class, say in a small group setting that he really didn't understand why all these women were taking up places here because they were just going to get married anyway. So it was there. Didn't affect me in any way. I did get married, but yeah, that comment has just stayed with me. So this would have been in 1959 or 60.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yeah. Terrible. I can only add very, very briefly that around the era that you were students there I believe that women generally had higher scores, SATs, achievement awards than men. And therefore one of the challenges that admissions faced, fortunately was never my call was how do we also attract-
Merle Glee Snyder:
Balance. Yeah.
Stephen Whitfield:
Right. Achieving gender balance. Right. Women were doing better.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. Martin, I see you put a comment in the chat. Would you like to say anything out loud?
Martin Levine:
Okay. Sure. I don't remember people talking about being liberal. I remember people calling me a bit radical and explaining radical meant going to the root and hearing faculty talk in the hall to one another. It seemed to me the big divide was when did you leave the communist party? Was it because of Hungary? Was it because of Poland? At what point they had become disillusioned with the party. Nice hearing the phrase Red diaper baby. I hadn't heard that in a long time. I heard it in high school at Bronx high school of science, where we had a lot of them. You mentioned CCNY from the people I knew CCNY was more radical because they had an actual communist student group.
Martin Levine:
At Brandeis, I recall a mass meeting and former student body president showed up back from Harvard law school, started talking about how he didn't like the military mind and then explained he was talking about Trotskyites and that there were Trotskyites who had infiltrated the student meeting and would the rest of us now leave and go into the next room without them. Our major protest when we started was South Africa and then later the Southern student movement. I was going down to North Carolina to a student's symposium. I asked student government to pay my greyhound bus ticket. And they said, well, I stopped off and see what was happening.
Martin Levine:
I had heard there were sit-ins down there. Who were the students leading them? Where they communists? So I went to where they were doing the sit-ins and I saw they were fraternity boys. Because in the middle of our talk, they say, "Oh, it's 12:00. Excuse me, we have to take a break. And our fraternity meets a women's sorority at the crossroads and we sing gospel together. Be back in half an hour." And the black college they was holding a meeting every evening to rally the spirits.
Martin Levine:
They put me up. "Say something, friend from the north." That evening there was a meeting in the city with the adult community, where the black adults decided they were going to support the young people. People were calling it sit-downs and a woman said, "No, no, no, that's a union term. We don't like that. We'll call it sit-ins. We're not union people." And the next week they founded SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. When I got back to Brandeis, the justice then was one of the centers of activism. So the editors decided to do a special issue about what was going on in the south, the city and movement and start a Northern student movement and printed a special edition and sent copies to every college in the country. You mentioned Max Lerner. So this movement was not getting much traction. The newspapers wouldn't right about it. And Marty Peretz talked to Max Lerner and got him to do a column on it in the New York post. And then the other newspapers picked it up.
Stephen Whitfield:
Amazing. Amazing. Thanks for those comments.
Martin Levine:
I'll mention one more. When I got back from the south, Thalia Howe said, "My husband wants to talk to you." And I went to talk to Irving Howe, and he said, "Would you write an article about your trip or dissent?"
Stephen Whitfield:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Martin Levine:
And I said, "But everything I saw was cliche as I went down on the bus and I saw these huts by the road that looked like chicken coops. And then I realized black people were living in it." And the bus stop where when I wanted in to get something to eat, everybody looked at me funny. I didn't realize until later everyone else in that room was black. The whites were in a different room. And after that stop people on the bus change their seats and all the blacks moved to the back of the bus.
Martin Levine:
And of course seeing the south for the first time. Colored men, colored women, white men, white women washrooms in the bus station. The three local young men who showed me around, also cliché. One pre-law, one pre-sociology, one pre-minister. Then I decided not to write for descent because my mother had warned me. The FBI watches everything, they keep the record forever. And I later did read about a woman in New Jersey from the FBI, went and investigated, because when she was a teenager she picked up a communist leaflet. So the thinking of the red scare was certainly in our minds.
Stephen Whitfield:
But did your mother know that dissent was vehemently anti-communist?
Martin Levine:
Oh, no. She wasn't talking about dissent. She was just doing the general warning about-
Stephen Whitfield:
Leftism.
Martin Levine:
My father a school teacher was very brave. He would subscribe to the teacher's union newspaper in New York, not join the union that was too much, too open. And while his friends had joined the communist party of city college somehow he didn't happen to. As I mentioned the whole talk among the faculty was when had they broken with the party.
Stephen Whitfield:
Amazing. Thank you for those comments.
Sharon Rosenberg:
We have time for maybe one or two more. Bruce.
Bruce Litwer:
Thank you. Thanks again Steve as always this has been another wonderful discussion. A couple of comments to support what you said. I can remember through the course of the years, when Sacher would talk about the composition of classes. He often said that we take people on merit except that in the case of men and women, we need to change that slightly, otherwise the class would be overwhelmingly female. I know what you said. Then talking about another thing that's come up, when I went to law school and I'm sure this was true at professional schools that other people attended, medicine and law school, et cetera, et cetera. In my class at Columbia of 300 there was somewhere between five and 10 women. And it took a long time before you saw women lawyers.
Bruce Litwer:
For the first, I don't know how many years of my practicing law, you never saw any women lawyers. And then all of a sudden there were women lawyers. And as one of our classmates experienced in a shared with me and perhaps she'll make the comment. Women partners in a law firm took a very much longer time for that to happen in part for the same reason that what's the sense in investing in women. They're going to get pregnant and drop out. And that the firm would have put in a lot of money and time and that they wouldn't get a fair return. So nowadays that seems strange because I'm sure the law schools and professional schools are at least 50% female and have been for a while. But certainly in the 60s, the early 60s.
Bruce Litwer:
We all graduated in 61. So I was out of law school in 64, till well into the 80s I don't think we saw women who were lawyers. And if we did there were not very many of them. And I'm sure the same is true of medicine and accounting and the other fields. So that's why women went into other professions because they weren't readily welcome or admitted. And besides the talk in my home with respect to women, was that it would be good if they became teachers. So they could be home when the kids came home from school and they would be home when the kids were home on vacation. I think that was the sense of it.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yes. And one of the great mystery Bruce is, how that changes and how what is taken for granted as stable and unchanging, how suddenly it is realized that there's something wrong with this, something problematic about it. And therefore it's no longer acceptable. It's one of the great mysteries. I think of history. The great example is always slavery. Until a few quakers in the late 18th century, nobody really thought there was anything particularly horrible about slavery. And it takes three generations and then it's eliminated through a war in the United States. But before that it was simply assumed to be this is the way the world works.
Linda Kramm:
If I could just say since I think Bruce was probably referring to many. When I was at Brandeis, I don't think anybody was really encouraged to go to law school. It was looked down on. Graduate school was fine for the men. And I later lived in Cambridge where my next door neighbor was the great constitutional lawyer at Harvard, Mark De Wolfe Howe. And when I went to talk to him about the possibility of going to law school, he went to see the Dean at Harvard and reported back that a man with my board scores would definitely have a very good chance, but it wasn't worth spending the time on a woman who is going to leave the practice of law and just raise babies.
Linda Kramm:
So that was the prevailing view. And Brandeis was not particularly ahead of its time in that regard. Ironically, I went to law school because Father Drinan at Boston college law school, who I worked with on a project, came into my office one day and said, We have no women coming to the law school and it starts in two weeks. Can you make it?" And that was what prompted me, but there was a general assumption that professional school was really not for women.
Stephen Whitfield:
Yes, I would want to conclude very, very briefly because Sharon I think you're giving me the stage hook. That the remarkable thing I think of those who graduated in 60 and 61 is that this was, I think, close to the last gasp of that old order that somehow the 50s turns into the 60s in that stereotypical way. Not long after, and not immediately, not in 1960 in 61, but there was a momentum for change and a momentum for recognizing social problems that had been ignored not long after you graduated. And in some ways that momentum has never stopped.
Sharon Rivo:
My recollection. And I think it's pretty good though is in the Poli Sci department. Linda you were not a Poli Sci major.
Linda Kramm:
No.
Sharon Rivo:
Okay. Politics major. And the politics department though, at least the faculty there, both Roche and Fuchs I remember distinctly and maybe Milty too. I don't remember. They were the ones who basically called all of the majors in and we were much more egalitarian in the politics department than in the history department and some of the others. So you're right, It was on the cusp of the changing it seems to me at that point. But I also remember when I applied to graduate school as well. And I remember going for interviews at two places in particular, one was John Hopkins and the other was Fletcher school, both of which I was told that as a woman and as a Jew, like forget it. Well, they might be able to because I basically had the qualifications, but there was certainly no money and that I should find a rich uncle someplace.
Sharon Rivo:
So that was not true at the University of Chicago or Berkeley, but for those two private institutions there was anti-Semitism at least from... and I was shocked. I had a name, Pucker, that wasn't particularly Jewish. I was blonde and small but I had gone to Brandeis. So I was stamped as being Jewish. And I was shocked because I had never quite honestly experienced anything like that in my life. Sharon, are we supposed to wrap it up? Because I just have a couple of quick remarks as a thank you to professor Woodfield. First of all, delighted for this evening, for your book, for your time. Steve and I are long time colleagues and I've had the pleasure of both of working with him over the years as we all know, not only is he a teacher, a scholar and a mentor but as you may know, he's a bench as well.
Sharon Rivo:
In October of 2019 a few of us, including Linda, had the pleasure of going and traveling with Steve. He was a scholar in residence for a Brandeis University organized trip to Normandy, which is a plug basically if we ever get up and running again. If you get an opportunity beautifully organized by the University and Steve was wonderful but there's a whole bunch of trips that they have. I've been on a couple of them that I would encourage you all. It's great fun. And you get to see, colleagues and friends and the level of the participants, as well as the programs that are planned. But also Steve thank you for many years of being on the board of my national center for Jewish film, where he's been absolutely wonderful. But in addition to that, I'm actually still teaching and I'm teaching a course this semester in the nudges and film department.
Sharon Rivo:
I call it Jews on screen, but it's actually about American Jewish cinema and quite honestly, I have four articles that Steve has written that are in the syllabus. I couldn't get along without you and the work that you've done on American Jewish cinema for Fiddler On The Roof to Avalon, he wears a lot of hats but absolutely a first rate, as you all know in all of these things. So thank you for a marvelous book and really at least for me and I think for all of us a fascinating peek behind the scenes. A look at some of our professors and mentors that information that obviously we just didn't know at the time. And I certainly didn't know up until I read the book. And I think a view of how this institution, which was created in the face of anti-Semitism and racism, but then provided a haven and nurtured the development of liberalism, social justice for all in America.
Sharon Rivo:
And then your sort of wistful witnessing of the demise of some of those values. And as the times changed and therefore the character of the University. You've captured, I think the uniqueness of Brandeis University and for me at least, sort of revealing what I would call the soul of the institution, which we as students were so very, very fortunate to have been able to experience, but at least I was somewhat unaware of the depth and the breadth of a lot of the things that you wrote about. So thank you very much and best wishes for good health and much happiness and continue doing all of these wonderful things.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thanks, Sharon. Thank you very much Steve. Thank you Joan and Milt. Thank you Mike and Judy. Thank you, Adrian for all of your work on this event and thanks to everyone for joining us for this. We hope to see you at more pre-alumni weekend programs and join alumni weekend itself. Also alumni college this year, instead of just being on one day, it's actually a series of events taking place for April 29th through June 30th. There's about 10 events. So be on the lookout for more emails about that. We hope to see you there!